rxvt-unicode 9.06 with 256 colors (and clickable links)

January 4, 2009

Up until right now I’ve been using xterm. While it’s not the best of terms it does support 256 colors out of the box (and I don’t use fancy stuff like transparency/translucency). What it has been lacking however, and which Flo pointed out, was the support to make URLs clickable. This is an important feature, especially since I use mutt and slrn regularly, and my IRC-client is irssi, so the majority of links I’m interested in arrives in my terminal.

So I went looking for a term with clickable urls but also with 256-color-support and found rxvt-unicode (or short: urxvt), which is a fork of the original rxvt with unicode-support (duh!). To get 256 colors working you have to apply the urxvt-8.2-256color.patch in the doc subdirectory of the source.

`Up until right now I’ve been using xterm. While it’s not the best of terms it does support 256 colors out of the box (and I don’t use fancy stuff like transparency/translucency). What it has been lacking however, and which Flo pointed out, was the support to make URLs clickable. This is an important feature, especially since I use mutt and slrn regularly, and my IRC-client is irssi, so the majority of links I’m interested in arrives in my terminal.

So I went looking for a term with clickable urls but also with 256-color-support and found rxvt-unicode (or short: urxvt), which is a fork of the original rxvt with unicode-support (duh!). To get 256 colors working you have to apply the urxvt-8.2-256color.patch in the doc subdirectory of the source.

`

To configure urxvt you can conveniently use your ~/.Xdefaults. Mine looks like this:

``Up until right now I’ve been using xterm. While it’s not the best of terms it does support 256 colors out of the box (and I don’t use fancy stuff like transparency/translucency). What it has been lacking however, and which Flo pointed out, was the support to make URLs clickable. This is an important feature, especially since I use mutt and slrn regularly, and my IRC-client is irssi, so the majority of links I’m interested in arrives in my terminal.

So I went looking for a term with clickable urls but also with 256-color-support and found rxvt-unicode (or short: urxvt), which is a fork of the original rxvt with unicode-support (duh!). To get 256 colors working you have to apply the urxvt-8.2-256color.patch in the doc subdirectory of the source.

`Up until right now I’ve been using xterm. While it’s not the best of terms it does support 256 colors out of the box (and I don’t use fancy stuff like transparency/translucency). What it has been lacking however, and which Flo pointed out, was the support to make URLs clickable. This is an important feature, especially since I use mutt and slrn regularly, and my IRC-client is irssi, so the majority of links I’m interested in arrives in my terminal.

So I went looking for a term with clickable urls but also with 256-color-support and found rxvt-unicode (or short: urxvt), which is a fork of the original rxvt with unicode-support (duh!). To get 256 colors working you have to apply the urxvt-8.2-256color.patch in the doc subdirectory of the source.

`

To configure urxvt you can conveniently use your ~/.Xdefaults. Mine looks like this:

``

The nice side-effect is that urxvt is about 10 times faster than xterm (try it by cat-ing a large file and using ‘time’ to measure it).